Comcast, the No. 1 cable provider, measured by subscriber numbers, has been considering a bid for the No. 2 player, Time Warner Cable, which is already being pursued by a smaller cable firm, Charter Communications Inc. But Ajit Pai, a Republican commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, said in an interview that the Obama administration would be unlikely to approve a combination of Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Antitrust authorities began investigating Amazon earlier this year over a price parity policy it applied to third-party sellers. A clause in the agreement with sellers banned them from offering their products for a lower price on other platforms, such as eBay Inc. or the sellers’ own online shops.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131126/german-cartel-office-drops-amazon-review-on-pricing/feed/0Qualcomm Says China Is Investigating Whether Firm Broke Its Anti-Monopoly Lawhttp://allthingsd.com/20131125/qualcomm-says-china-is-investigating-whether-firm-broke-its-anti-monopoly-law/
http://allthingsd.com/20131125/qualcomm-says-china-is-investigating-whether-firm-broke-its-anti-monopoly-law/#commentsMon, 25 Nov 2013 17:12:09 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=374929Qualcomm said Monday that a Chinese government agency is looking into whether the chipmaker broke one of the country’s anti-monopoly laws.

Asa Mathat | All Things Digital

In a statement, Qualcomm said that the substance of the investigation is confidential, and that it is not aware of any charge that it has broken the law. “We will continue to cooperate with the (Chinese government agency) as it conducts its confidential investigation,” Qualcomm said.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs recently told The Wall Street Journal that it was seeing fallout in China from the NSA scandal and other issues.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131125/qualcomm-says-china-is-investigating-whether-firm-broke-its-anti-monopoly-law/feed/0Google Amends Proposal to Settle EU Antitrust Investigationhttp://allthingsd.com/20131028/eu-gives-googles-rivals-four-weeks-to-review-latest-antitrust-proposals/
http://allthingsd.com/20131028/eu-gives-googles-rivals-four-weeks-to-review-latest-antitrust-proposals/#commentsMon, 28 Oct 2013 17:49:08 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=368735Google Inc. offered new proposals to address European Union concerns that the company unfairly uses its search engine to promote its own services.

The bloc gave Google’s rivals four weeks to review the proposals, which change the way the company displays results, particularly for specialized shopping and local searches. The company also lowered from an earlier proposal the prices it charges rivals to appear in results.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131028/eu-gives-googles-rivals-four-weeks-to-review-latest-antitrust-proposals/feed/0Apple Gets Its E-Book Antitrust Monitorhttp://allthingsd.com/20131017/apple-gets-its-e-book-antitrust-monitor/
http://allthingsd.com/20131017/apple-gets-its-e-book-antitrust-monitor/#commentsThu, 17 Oct 2013 10:03:06 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=366207The federal judge who found Apple guilty of colluding with five of the six largest publishers in the U.S. in an e-book price-fixing scheme has chosen the external antitrust compliance monitors charged with making sure the company doesn’t overstep the law again.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote tapped former federal prosecutor Michael Bromwich to supervise Apple’s antitrust compliance training program. Assisting him will be Barry Nigro, the chair of the antitrust department at law firm Fried Frank.

A former assistant U.S. attorney and Justice Department inspector General, Bromwich was part of the government’s trial team in the U.S. case against former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel Oliver North, and more recently headed up the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency established to monitor oil and gas development following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Bromwich has plenty of experience in bringing reform, oversight and compliance to messy situations, but his antitrust background is a bit lacking. Indeed, as others have noted, he doesn’t really have one. Presumably that’s why Nigro was brought on to assist him. Prior to his stint at Fried Frank, Nigro served as deputy director for the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission. His specialty there: Anticompetitive practices investigations and litigation.

Apple, which had the right to object to both appointments, declined comment. Earlier this month, the company filed notice with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, announcing its intent to appeal Cote’s ruling.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131017/apple-gets-its-e-book-antitrust-monitor/feed/0Google Nears EU Settlementhttp://allthingsd.com/20131001/google-nears-eu-settlement/
http://allthingsd.com/20131001/google-nears-eu-settlement/#commentsTue, 01 Oct 2013 10:02:01 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=362082Google Inc. appeared to have made a significant step toward settling a long-running competition case with the European Union over its signature search engine after the EU’s competition chief said new Google concessions had moved it much closer to addressing key antitrust concerns.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131001/google-nears-eu-settlement/feed/0Apple's E-Book Punishment Court Order Is Final, and Not as Bad as Apple Fearedhttp://allthingsd.com/20130906/apples-e-book-punishment-court-order-is-final-and-not-as-bad-as-apple-feared/
http://allthingsd.com/20130906/apples-e-book-punishment-court-order-is-final-and-not-as-bad-as-apple-feared/#commentsFri, 06 Sep 2013 14:16:06 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=356479Here’s the last word, for now, on the punishment Apple will receive after losing its e-book price-fixing trial: It’s not as bad as Apple first feared, but Apple still isn’t happy.

You can see the order from U.S. District Court Denise Cote embedded at the bottom of this post. If you’ve been following this story — my colleague John Paczkowski has been providing excellent coverage — then you’ll know what to expect: A set of remedies that limit Apple’s ability to control pricing of its e-books in general, and have specific rules about the ways it can deal with individual publishers.

But Cote’s order is also significantly milder than what the DOJ was originally asking for. Gone, for instance, are broad new rules about the way Apple can run its iTunes store. And while the court is still going to appoint an “external compliance monitor” to keep an eye on Apple, that person is going to have much less power than the DOJ had asked for.

This still does not satisfy Apple. “Apple did not conspire to fix ebook pricing. The iBookstore gave customers more choice and injected much needed innovation and competition into the market,” says spokesman Tom Neumayr, via email. “Apple will pursue an appeal of the injunction.”

During a hearing in a New York federal court on Tuesday, Judge Denise Cote narrowed the scope of the penalties the Department of Justice wants leveled upon Apple, saying she doesn’t want them to intrude too much into the company’s business operations.

“I want this injunction to rest as lightly as possible on how Apple runs its business,” Cote said. “I want Apple to have the flexibility to innovate.”

To that end, Cote said she does not support broad government oversight of all of Apple’s content distribution deals beyond e-books, nor does she feel that imposing new requirements that would force Apple to allow rival e-book retailers like Amazon to link to their own e-bookstores from iOS apps is wise.

“I don’t want to do more than is necessary here. The App Store was only an incidental part of this trial,” Cote said, adding that the benefits of such a sanction aren’t worth the “disturbance” they would cause to Apple’s management of the App Store.

But on another sanction, an external monitor charged with evaluating Apple’s internal antitrust policies, Cote took a harder line, saying she’s skeptical of the company’s commitment to changing its behavior.

“Apple has been given several opportunities to demonstrate to this Court that it has taken the lessons of this litigation seriously,” Cote said. “I am disappointed to say that it has not taken advantage of those opportunities. I invited and expected a detailed and persuasive presentation of the steps Apple was committed to take to ensure that the government need never again expend its resources to bring Apple into court for violations of the country’s antitrust laws. Apple’s August 19 letter to the government is its most detailed response in this regard and it is inadequate. I have been reluctant to appoint a monitor for several reasons. But I believe based on the record before me now that I should. I believe that a monitor with a carefully defined role can help ensure that competition is restored and preserved.”

Caveat: The monitor would have a far more limited mandate than the one proposed by the government. It would simply oversee Apple’s internal antitrust compliance policies and employee training on them, and only on a limited basis. Hardly the sort of empowered, roving monitor the DOJ requested.

So it looks like Apple may have won itself a fair bit relief from the proposed sanctions it has described as “wildly out of proportion to the issues and evidence in the case.” Clearly, it hasn’t completely sold Cote on the more “modest” injunction it proposed earlier this month, but it’s certainly given her cause to dial the DOJ’s proposed remedies way back. Which raises the question: given the diminishing penalties in the case, what did government go to trial for?

Apple and the Justice Department are to submit revised proposed penalties to Cote today. She hopes to issue a ruling on them next week.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130828/the-incredible-shrinking-apple-e-book-remedy/feed/0Apple Says DOJ's E-Book Remedies Are Biased in Amazon's Favorhttp://allthingsd.com/20130827/apple-says-dojs-e-book-remedies-are-biased-in-amazons-favor/
http://allthingsd.com/20130827/apple-says-dojs-e-book-remedies-are-biased-in-amazons-favor/#commentsTue, 27 Aug 2013 11:10:44 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=353778Apple has long maintained that the proposed remedies in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book price-fixing case against it are heavy-handed, lambasting them as “wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm.” And the DOJ’s recent revision of those remedies hasn’t much changed that position.

In a court filing released Monday, Apple berated the DOJ once again, calling its revised proposed remedies a “broadside masquerading as a brief” and a “transparent attempt to attack the credibility of Apple and its counsel, and obtain an injunction wildly out of proportion to the issues and evidence in the case.” And it asked the presiding court to order the DOJ to withdraw it and submit a new one that hews to issues it claims were actually adjudicated in court.

According to Apple, the DOJ’s brief is predicated on arguments it ultimately abandoned at trial, and materials that never made it into evidence. And it is the company’s view that it is biased in favor of Amazon.

“Plaintiffs devote much of their brief to seeking to justify an injunction directed at Apple’s unilateral dealings with Amazon (and other e-book retailers) in its App Store, an issue that the plaintiffs did not pursue at trial. Plaintiffs are seeking a remedy that would give Amazon significant competitive advantage over Apple — an advantage it is neither entitled to nor deserves.”

Apple’s issue here is with the DOJ’s demand that it allow rival e-book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to provide links from their e-book apps to their own e-bookstores without paying any fee or commission to Apple on sales made through them. It’s vehemently opposed to that and pretty much any remedy that affects the way it runs the App Store.

Apple is also opposed to the DOJ’s proposal for an external monitor, which it argues “exceeds the bounds of even criminal price-fixing cases.” But then it’s pretty much opposed to all the agency’s remedies, because it maintains that it never did anything illegal.

As the company wrote in a filing earlier this month, “Apple does not believe it violated the antitrust laws, and, in any event, the conduct for which the Court found it liable has ended and cannot recur as a result of the publishers’ consent decrees. In light of these facts, no further injunction is warranted.”

Apple and the DOJ are scheduled to meet Judge Denise Cote in court today to discuss the matter.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130827/apple-says-dojs-e-book-remedies-are-biased-in-amazons-favor/feed/0DOJ Softens Proposed Apple E-Book Injunctions, Slightlyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130823/doj-softens-proposed-apple-ebook-injunctions-slightly/
http://allthingsd.com/20130823/doj-softens-proposed-apple-ebook-injunctions-slightly/#commentsFri, 23 Aug 2013 18:40:05 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=353290The U.S. Department of Justice is willing to temper the proposed remedies in its e-book price-fixing case against Apple, but not all that much.

On Friday, the DOJ submitted a revision of its proposed injunction, dialing it back slightly in order to limit the possibility that changes in the publishing and technology industries might cause it to “outlive its usefulness and unnecessarily harm Apple.” Under the terms of the revised proposal, the length of the injunction will be shortened to five years from 10, and the restrictions placed on deals Apple can strike with publishers will stand for two to four years, rather than five.

Hardly the significant adjustments for which Apple has been angling, slagging the remedies variously as “draconian,” “intrusive,” and “wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm.” But the DOJ is clearly unwilling to back down from what it feels are necessary and justified sanctions against a player it feels can’t be trusted.

In its latest filing, the DOJ said that the remedy adjustments Apple proposed “imposed virtually no limitations” on its conduct, beyond those established by the DOJ’s earlier settlements with the publishers involved in the case.

“Quite simply, Apple wants to continue business as usual, regardless of the antitrust laws,” the DOJ said in its filing. “Under these circumstances, this Court should have no confidence that Apple on its own effectively can ensure that its illegal conduct will not be repeated. There must be significant oversight by someone not entrenched in Apple’s culture of insensitivity to basic tenets of antitrust law.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130823/doj-softens-proposed-apple-ebook-injunctions-slightly/feed/0Damages in Apple E-Book Case to Be Decided in Mayhttp://allthingsd.com/20130815/damages-in-apple-e-book-case-to-be-decided-in-may/
http://allthingsd.com/20130815/damages-in-apple-e-book-case-to-be-decided-in-may/#commentsThu, 15 Aug 2013 21:00:44 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=351473U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, the jurist who ruled last month that Apple illegally conspired with five major publishers to raise prices of e-books, has set a date for the trial that will determine the damages Apple owes. In an order issued this week, Cote said that barring some earlier resolution, a jury trial on damages — which could reach hundreds of millions of dollars — will be held next May.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130815/damages-in-apple-e-book-case-to-be-decided-in-may/feed/0Europe Thinks Google Can Do Better on Search Concessionshttp://allthingsd.com/20130717/europe-thinks-google-can-do-better-on-search-concessions/
http://allthingsd.com/20130717/europe-thinks-google-can-do-better-on-search-concessions/#commentsWed, 17 Jul 2013 16:18:42 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=343155European Commission competition head Joaquin Almunia, in his continued efforts to crack down on Google’s alleged anticompetitive search practices, announced today at a news briefing that the concessions Google has offered “are not enough to overcome our concerns,” according to Reuters.

Wrote a Google spokesperson today, “Our proposal to the European Commission clearly addresses their four areas of concern. We continue to work with the Commission to settle this case.”

European regulators have been investigating Google since 2010, and Google submitted remedies earlier this year. Where the U.S. Federal Trade Commission already settled its antitrust concerns with Google, the EU is still threatening substantial fines and court battles.

In the latest example, a federal judge ruled last week that the price-matching provision in Apple Inc.’s contracts with five major book publishers was part of a conspiracy to fix e-book prices. The contracts required the publishers to give the technology giant’s iTunes store the best deal in the marketplace on e-books.

Other courts have taken a similarly dim view of these so-called most-favored-nation clauses, which take their name from a longstanding principle of international trade and are common in industries ranging from health care to television to financial services. One skeptical ruling came in a recent Justice Department complaint against insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

But the finding by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in the Apple case was especially significant because it was made following a trial, rather than in pretrial proceedings.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130714/apple-ruling-heaps-doubt-on-mfn-clauses/feed/0EU Launches Probe Into Telecom Companieshttp://allthingsd.com/20130711/eu-launches-probe-into-telecom-companies/
http://allthingsd.com/20130711/eu-launches-probe-into-telecom-companies/#commentsThu, 11 Jul 2013 14:30:49 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=340906The European Commission’s antitrust authority Thursday said it has opened an investigation into Internet service providers over concerns that they may have abused their dominant market position.

The European Union’s executive arm said officials from the EU and national antitrust authorities began inspections of the offices of telecom companies on Tuesday.

Apple seized the moment and brilliantly played its hand. Taking advantage of the Publisher Defendants’ fear of and frustration over Amazon’s pricing … [Apple] provided the Publisher Defendants with the vision, the format, the timetable, and the coordination that they needed to raise e-book prices. … The evidence is overwhelming that Apple knew of the unlawful aims of the conspiracy and joined that conspiracy with the specific intent to help it succeed.

— U.S. District Judge Denise Cote

Apple has vowed to appeal a federal judge’s ruling Wednesday that it colluded with five publishers to raise the retail price of e-books and break Amazon’s choke hold on the nascent market. And the company thinks its chances are pretty good.

But legal scholars aren’t so sure. Those who’ve read U.S. District Judge Denise Cote’s decision say its extensive factual findings and careful application of law will make it difficult to fight.

“Apple will appeal once the damages trial is complete,” Stanford law school professor Mark Lemley told AllThingsD. “But I wouldn’t be very confident of their chances.”

According to Pam Samuelson, the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, Apple’s task on appeal is a daunting one.

“Apple may have a tough time getting this ruling reversed because the judge made findings of fact about the antitrust violation that appellate courts typically defer to,” Samuelson told AllThingsD. “Most reversals happen as to interpretations of the law.”

Samuelson’s point: Apple argued that the facts show no conspiracy in restraint of trade. But Cote found that the company’s actions were a per se violation of antitrust law. In other words, they were inherently illegal, so there was no need to prove that they had any anticompetitive effect on the e-books market. And Cote’s opinion relies so heavily on facts that it leaves very little room for an appellate court reversal.

Philip Weiser, dean of the University of Colorado law school and a former DOJ official, agreed, saying Cote’s ruling won’t be easily overturned. “This is a decisive defeat for Apple’s theory of the case,” Weiser said. “It will have a significant hurdle on appeal given the judge’s careful findings.”

To effectively argue against Cote’s ruling, Apple has to somehow convince the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that Cote made a mistake of law in writing it up. And at this point, the chances of that seem slim indeed.

“As a general matter, per se rulings are uncommon, but nakedly anticompetitive agreements among competitors are still firmly in that category,” Weiser said. “Apple’s challenge is thus to find a way to distinguish the facts of this case from that category, and the judge firmly rejected its arguments on that score.”

Now, that doesn’t mean Cote’s ruling is utterly bulletproof or that Apple won’t come at it with every weapon in its arsenal. Indeed, some observers have suggested the company may push the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But again, legal scholars are dubious.

“The Supreme Court? It’s possible, but unlikely,” said Stanford’s Lemley. “The case seems heavily dependent on the facts, not on a new question of law.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130710/apples-chances-on-an-e-book-ruling-appeal-are-lousy-say-legal-scholars/feed/0Apple Loses E-Book Antitrust Trialhttp://allthingsd.com/20130710/apple-loses-e-book-antitrust-trial/
http://allthingsd.com/20130710/apple-loses-e-book-antitrust-trial/#commentsWed, 10 Jul 2013 13:42:49 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=340475All of the big publishers settled with the U.S. government after the feds accused them of conspiring to fix e-book prices with Apple.

But Apple fought the case, and now it looks like that decision may cost Tim Cook: A federal judge has ruled against Apple in the antitrust trial.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said Apple conspired with the major book publishers to raise e-book pricing, in conjunction with its iPad launch in 2010.

While Apple executives and lawyers had argued that the company was simply working with publishers that were unhappy with the way Amazon priced its books, Cote dismissed the idea that Apple was a passive player: “Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy,” she wrote in her decision.

The next step will be a trial for damages, though Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said the company will appeal. Here’s his comment: “Apple did not conspire to fix ebook pricing and we will continue to fight against these false accusations. When we introduced the iBookstore in 2010, we gave customers more choice, injecting much needed innovation and competition into the market, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. We’ve done nothing wrong and we will appeal the judge’s decision.”

And here’s the DOJ’s victory dance, via a press release attributed to Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer: “This result is a victory for millions of consumers who choose to read books electronically … Companies cannot ignore the antitrust laws when they believe it is in their economic self-interest to do so. This decision by the court is a critical step in undoing the harm caused by Apple’s illegal actions.”

Google on Saturday confirmed that it has been contacted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission regarding the acquisition. The company and the FTC both declined to comment on the nature of the inquiry, but it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. Google Maps is a leading mapping and navigation service. Waze was a rising rival. In fact, back in April, Waze CEO Noam Bardin was talking up his company as the search behemoth’s only viable competitor in that space.

“The traditional players don’t have a model that’s scalable, and they have financial challenges, so Google is out there creating a new standard in terms of quality,” Bardin said. “We feel that we are the only reasonable competition to them in this market of creating maps that are really geared for mobile, for real-time, for consumers, and for the new world we’re moving into.”

If that’s truly the case, the Google’s acquisition of Waze could be problematic. Not only does it remove a potential competitor from the mapping space, it consolidates a ton of mapping data in Google’s hands, further extending the company’s dominance.

Could that be harmful to competition and consumers? That’s what the FTC hopes to determine.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130622/ftc-reviewing-googles-waze-acquisition/feed/0Steve Jobs, Winnie the Pooh and the iBook Launchhttp://allthingsd.com/20130617/steve-jobs-winnie-the-pooh-and-the-ibook-launch/
http://allthingsd.com/20130617/steve-jobs-winnie-the-pooh-and-the-ibook-launch/#commentsMon, 17 Jun 2013 19:28:03 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=333069Apple media boss Eddy Cue spent the morning on the stand during the Apple/Department of Justice ebooks/antitrust case. No news came of his appearance, which is zero surprise: The only real news that will come out of the trial will be a verdict.

Still! If you’re the kind of person who has an intense interest in all things Apple, you might have found items of interest during Cue’s testimony at Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Particularly the parts where Apple’s attorney asked Cue to talk about Steve Jobs.

I’m not sure why Apple lawyer Orin Snyder wanted Cue to spend time discussing his late boss, because I can’t see how it has any bearing on the case. But, then again, my legal training consists of watching some “L.A. Law” back in the ’90s.

The “page curls” in the iBook app, which show up when you flip an iBook’s page? That’s Steve Jobs’s idea.

It was Jobs’s idea to pick “Winnie-the-Pooh” as the freebie book that came with every iBook app. Not just because Jobs liked the book, Cue said, but because it showed off iBook’s capabilities: “It had beautiful color drawings, that had never been seen before in a digital book.”

Jobs was also specific about the book he used to show off the iBook during his initial iPad demo in January 2010. He picked Ted Kennedy’s “True Compass” memoir, because the Kennedy family “meant a lot to him,” Cue said.

Again: Will any of this have any bearing on the trial’s outcome? Seems unlikely. But we are approaching the end of this process. Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130617/steve-jobs-winnie-the-pooh-and-the-ibook-launch/feed/0Thomas Penfield Jackson, Judge in Microsoft Antitrust Case, Dead at 76http://allthingsd.com/20130616/thomas-penfield-jackson-judge-in-microsoft-antitrust-case-dead-at-76/
http://allthingsd.com/20130616/thomas-penfield-jackson-judge-in-microsoft-antitrust-case-dead-at-76/#commentsSun, 16 Jun 2013 20:42:57 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=332858Thomas Penfield Jackson, the federal judge who in 2000 branded software giant Microsoft a predatory monopolist that should be split in two, only to see his ruling reversed on appeal, has died of cancer complications at the age of 76, according to an obituary in the New York Times. An appeals court set aside his ruling in part because of interviews he gave to journalists in which he explained his views. Microsoft later settled the case and the government decided not to seek the company’s breakup.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130616/thomas-penfield-jackson-judge-in-microsoft-antitrust-case-dead-at-76/feed/0The Apple iBooks Origin Storyhttp://allthingsd.com/20130614/prior-to-ipad-steve-jobs-didnt-want-an-ibookstore/
http://allthingsd.com/20130614/prior-to-ipad-steve-jobs-didnt-want-an-ibookstore/#commentsFri, 14 Jun 2013 07:05:23 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=332278How’s this for irony: Steve Jobs was initially opposed to entering the e-book market over which Apple is now sparring with the U.S. Department of Justice in a Manhattan federal court.

Testifying in the DOJ’s e-book price-fixing case Thursday, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said that when he first approached Jobs with the idea of a bookstore in the fall of 2009, the Apple co-founder dismissed it.

“He wasn’t interested,” Cue said. “Steve never felt that the Mac or the iPhone were ideal reading devices. In the case of the phone, the screen was smaller, and in the case of the Mac, you had this keyboard and device, and it didn’t feel like a book.”

But as Apple began ramping up for the launch of the iPad, Cue broached the idea again, and Jobs had a change of heart.

“… When I got my first chance to touch the iPad, I became completely convinced that this was a huge opportunity for us to build the best e-reader that the market had ever seen,” Cue said. “And so I went to Steve and told him why I thought [the iPad] was going to be a great device for e-books. … and after some discussions he came back and said, you know, I think you’re right. I think this is great, and then he started coming up with ideas himself about what he wanted to do with it and how it would be even better as a reader and store.”

That was the “good part,” Cue explained, and it inspired Apple to approach publishers about selling their e-book titles. But there was a “bad part,” as well: Timing.

“This was in November,” said Cue. “We were launching the iPad in January. And so Steve said, ‘you can go do this, but you’ve got to get it done by January. … I want to be able to demo it onstage.’ And so that was the sort of challenge presented to me.”

And a challenge that Cue took upon himself to complete not just for Apple and the promise of a new revenue stream, but for Jobs, whose health was in decline at the time.

“Steve was near the end of his life when we were launching the iPad, and he was really proud of it,” Cue said. “He was working hard on it. I believed that iBooks was going to be a tremendous feature of the product. People were going to love it; our customers were just going to go wild about iPad and iBooks, and I wanted to be able to get that done in time for [the event] because it was really important to him. … I like getting my work done and I pride myself on being successful, but this had extra meaning to me.”

Just days after introducing Apple’s new iTunes Radio streaming music service at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Eddy Cue — Apple’s senior VP for Internet services and software, and its master dealmaker — appeared in a Manhattan federal court as a central witness in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book price-fixing case.

According to the government, Cue was the main intermediary between Apple and five major publishers, and the “chief ringleader” of an alleged conspiracy to shift the e-book industry from the wholesale pricing model established by Amazon to an agency model where publishers, not retailers, set e-book prices, sending them higher than they had been in the past. But on the witness stand Thursday, Cue maintained he was anything but.

Presented with phone records that suggested a group of five publishers were discussing among themselves Apple’s agency model proposal, Cue denied any knowledge of the communications. In fact, Cue said he didn’t even suspect the publishers might be coordinating. “I don’t believe they were working together to do the deal that I was working on, because I did those deals and I struggled and fought with them for many, many days to get them to sign,” Cue said. “And they argued different points. So if they were talking to each other, I would have assumed that I would have had a much easier time getting those deals done.”

And while the government was able to force him to acknowledge that the price of some e-books did rise after Apple opened its iBookstore, Cue remarked that this shouldn’t have been a surprise, given the publishers’ dissatisfaction with Amazon’s lowball $9.99 pricing. “They had expressed they wanted higher prices from us,” he said, reiterating what Cupertino has argued throughout this process: That it was the publishers who raised e-book prices, not Apple.

And when pressed to admit that higher e-book prices were not in the best interest of the general public, Cue refused to concede. Instead, he insisted that Apple’s entrance into the e-book market dramatically improved it. “We gave consumers great prices and a great selection of books that weren’t available elsewhere, in a better bookstore,” Cue said. “We gave them a great offer.”

Questioned by Apple’s chief counsel, Orin Snyder, on Thursday afternoon, Cue was a bit more forthcoming, bolstering Apple’s argument that it was concerned only with its own deal with publishers, and not with those of other retailers.

“My focus [on these deals] was from an Apple point of view. I [wasn’t] interested in [the publishers’] business, or how they do business with the — with anybody else. … I didn’t care at all what type of deals the publishers got or didn’t get from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or anybody else. I knew that if Barnes & Noble or Amazon were able to negotiate a better deal than I had from a consumer price point, I would get it as part of our MFN (Most Favored Nation agreement).”

And speaking directly to those MFNs, which ensured that Apple would always be able to sell e-books at least as cheaply as other retailers, Cue insisted that they were not — as the government alleges — intended to force rival e-book sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to the agency model.

“We did the MFN for the purposes of being able to compete on price,” Cue said. “The MFN has nothing to do with whether you’re on an agency model or any other model. That wasn’t the goal. [That] didn’t matter to us. That’s not what we were thinking. What we were thinking is, does the MFN give us competitive pricing irrespective of whatever models Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anybody else is in.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130613/apples-cue-says-publishers-pushed-for-higher-e-book-prices/feed/0EU Regulators Eye Google Again -- This Time It's Androidhttp://allthingsd.com/20130613/eu-regulators-eye-google-again-this-time-its-android/
http://allthingsd.com/20130613/eu-regulators-eye-google-again-this-time-its-android/#commentsThu, 13 Jun 2013 19:59:14 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=332181As the European Union’s antitrust investigation into Google’s search business draws closer to settlement, another probe of another of the company’s businesses appears to be in the offing.

The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, is reportedly investigating claims that Google used anticompetitive means to boost its Android operating system’s market share. According to documents cited by the Financial Times, which broke the story, the probe was inspired by the allegations of rivals like Microsoft and Nokia, which claim Google has been licensing Android to mobile device manufacturers below cost and making demands about the placement of its various services on their handsets. Filed in April, the complaint accuses Google of using Android “as a deceptive way to build advantages for key Google apps in 70 percent of the smartphones shipped today.”

Sources described the probe as informal, and it’s unclear if anything will come of it. That said, there’s plenty of precedent for such preliminary efforts to expand into full-blown investigations if the agency finds merit in the allegations. And given criticism of the EC’s provisional antitrust settlement with Google, EU competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia will likely be reviewing the probe’s findings with a very keen eye.

Google declined comment on the probe, but issued a statement generally disputing the allegations leveled against it. “Android is an open platform that fosters competition. Handset makers, carriers and consumers can decide how to use Android, including which applications they want to use.”

Is Time Warner Cable blocking some TV programmers from selling their stuff to online video outlets?

Yes we are, says Time Warner Cable.

Here’s the company’s response to a Bloomberg piece today, which said that one of the country’s biggest cable TV operators had distribution agreements which would penalize TV networks that tried to do deals with “over the top” Web TV providers.*

Short version: “Everyone does it, and we’re hardly the worst offender.” Longer version, via an emailed response from the company’s PR office:

“It is absurd to suggest that, in today’s highly competitive video marketplace, obtaining some level of exclusivity is anticompetitive. Exclusivities and windows are extremely common in the entertainment industry; that’s exactly how entertainment companies compete. This is why, for example, you can only watch Fast and Furious 6 in a movie theater (not in your living room), Sunday Ticket on DirecTV, and the new Arrested Development episodes on Netflix. In fact, the amount and scope of exclusivity and windowing in Time Warner Cable’s arrangements with programmers pales by comparison to that found between other players in the entertainment ecosystem.”

So does this explain why would-be cable competitors, like Intel, have yet to reach deals with programmers?

Not really, according to industry executives I’ve talked to.

Their argument: Time Warner Cable has deals that penalize some programmers from selling to new outlets. But it doesn’t have those deals with the biggest programmers, like Discovery, Viacom and Comcast’s NBCUniversal — which are the ones that an Intel, or an Apple, or whomever, would need to sign on to launch a competitive TV product.

“Can you imagine [News Corp. COO] Chase Carey signing a deal like that?” said an industry executive familiar with the cable industry. (News Corp., which owns Fox, Fox News and other TV networks, also owns this website).

In general, those programmers are at least interested in selling to new entrants like Intel, because they’d like as many people buying their stuff as possible. They were also happy to sell programming to satellite TV providers when they showed up 20 years ago, and they were also happy to sell to telco TV providers when they showed up 10 years ago.

The gates to new Web TV deals, I’m told, are more basic: Intel, or whoever wants to buy TV from the programmers, will have to buy it the same way everyone else does — in bundles that don’t allow much flexibility. And the programmers expect the Web video guys to pay more than everyone else, because they’re the new kids on the block.

What will be interesting to see is how lawmakers and regulators respond to Time Warner Cable’s admission.

The company clearly doesn’t think they are violating antitrust regulations. Its 12 million subscribers make Time Warner Cable the country’s second biggest cable TV player, behind Comcast; overall there are about 90 million pay-TV customers in the U.S. But if their actions prevent most of the country from watching programming on a new outlet, how will that go over in Washington?

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130612/time-warner-cable-says-its-blocking-some-programmers-from-the-web-but-its-still-not-holding-up-web-tv/feed/0Is Steve Jobs Message a Smoking Gun in Apple E-Book Case?http://allthingsd.com/20130612/is-steve-jobs-message-a-smoking-gun-in-apple-e-book-case/
http://allthingsd.com/20130612/is-steve-jobs-message-a-smoking-gun-in-apple-e-book-case/#commentsWed, 12 Jun 2013 20:34:14 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=331620Since it was first accused of conspiring to raise the prices of e-books, Apple has maintained it didn’t care what sort of deals publishers arranged with other retailers, as long as they honored the terms of their agreement to sell books on its iTunes store. Apple’s lead counsel Orin Snyder claimed as much in his opening arguments in the Department of Justice’s e-book antitrust case against the company last week.

“The negotiations make clear that the interests of the publishers and Apple were not aligned,” Snyder said. “Apple wanted lower prices on its own book store, and was indifferent to prices throughout the rest of the industry.”

But a new document entered into evidence Wednesday by the DOJ suggests that Apple may not have been quite as indifferent to publishers’ deals with Amazon as it professes to be. It’s a Jan. 14, 2010, message from Steve Jobs to Eddy Cue, his point man for e-book negotiations, and in it he says he wants publishers to push Amazon to an agency pricing model where publishers, not retailers, set prices.

“I can live with this as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year,” Jobs wrote. “If not, I’m not sure we can be competitive …”

Apple hasn’t yet had a chance to explain the message, which Snyder claims was never sent. But it promises to do so tomorrow when Eddy Cue takes the stand. Just how isn’t yet clear, though it’s worth noting that the subject line of the message in question is “Book prices thoughts” and it’s clearly part of a longer thread. Apple has argued throughout the trial that the DOJ’s case is built on cherry-picked documents that don’t support its theories when put in broader context. Perhaps that’s what we’ll see tomorrow.